Emerging diseases

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• Emerging diseases, tracked and mapped

  Feb 18th 2016, 17:08 BY THE DATA TEAM
  
  

   A plague on all your houses

  
  Emerging infectious diseases, earliest instances of human infection, 1940 to 2013Show all1940-601960-801980-2000> 2000

  
  

  ZIKA and Ebola are just two of the latest, better-known examples in a list of more than 300 new infectious diseases that have been identified since 1940. Some, like HIV/AIDS, have killed millions since infecting their first human victim. Others, like several highly lethal strains of avian influenza, have not yet mastered the task of spreading from one human to another. For now, such bugs are a danger in places where people are too close, too often, to the animals and insects known to carry them, such as hunting areas of African jungles or massive farms. 

   
  Sticking a pin on the map when a new pathogen is first found in a human can help spot places where such events cluster. Those hotspots can then be watched for emerging diseases. Vigilance can help contain bugs—that are particularly nasty or highly contagious—at source, before they spread like fire around the world. EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group based in New York, has gathered and collated each pin's location. The resulting map shows that a large chunk of new diseases were found for the first time in Europe and America. But many of them could have started their foray into humans elsewhere, in places with no hospitals or sophisticated laboratories to spot previously undiscovered microbes.Comment (3)
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• Source: EcoHealth Alliance; PMC;
  WHO; The Economist
  

  NOTE: Where specific geographic locations are unavailable,
  dots representing outbreaks are clustered in the centre
  of their reported countries or provinces of origin.
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